Since making our initial gift, the program has continued to expand and flourish. We saw that the need to provide additional scholarships was there and we were encouraged to continue our support.

Expanding Access to Bridge through Endowed Scholarship

By Adam Sylvain

In the summer of 2019, Walter Freedman D’60 T’61 and his wife Karen Harrison established an endowed Bridge scholarship fund that gives preference to first-generation, low-income Dartmouth students who demonstrate leadership goals and potential.

Recognizing the impact of their gift and an ongoing need to make Bridge accessible to even more students, the couple recently added to their fund. A total of six Bridge students received scholarships from the fund this past summer alone.

“Since making our initial gift, the program has continued to expand and flourish,” says Freedman. “We saw that the need to provide additional scholarships was there and we were encouraged to continue our support.”

Increased scholarship funding and the transition to virtual program delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic has helped improve access and bolster the talent and diversity in each Bridge cohort, which Freedman says he has witnessed firsthand in conversations with several scholarship recipients.

He has also served as an evaluator for several of the team capstone projects and says it is no surprise that Bridge students are able to leverage their experience to pursue internships and employment at companies like Goldman Sachs, Amazon, and Microsoft. 

“It always strikes me that in just five weeks students learn this relatively complex vocabulary that they are able to apply in assessing how to properly value a company,” explains Freedman. “Through their hard work and the incredible teaching of Tuck faculty, they gain knowledge they would not have had access to in their liberal arts studies.”